


A Difference of Semantics

by Westgate (Harkpad)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Burn injuries, Fire, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 15:58:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11256216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harkpad/pseuds/Westgate
Summary: Clint misses his birthday because he's in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in a fire. A fire where he saved four kids and managed to get out alive, so that's good. Phil can't decide if reckless is the word he wants, or if hero is the word he wants.





	A Difference of Semantics

**Author's Note:**

> It was Clint's birthday a few days ago! This started out like most of mine, an attempt to pour more h/c fics into the tags, but turned into a sort of birthday fic. Happy Birthday, Clint!

“Where’s Phil?” Clint whispers, because his throat is burning, like he swallowed molten lava. Maybe he did. There was so much fire. Now it hurts to breathe; sharp needles scrape down his throat and there’s sandpaper in his lungs, but he has to try to breathe. He sucks in the air like he’s been holding his breath for a week. Maybe he has.

“Stay still,” and it’s not Phil; it’s Natasha, who is just as good, but not who he wants this second.

“Phil,” he says again, but it sounds papery thin to his ringing ears.

“He’s coming. He’s coming,” Nat says, smoothing his hair with her hands. “Stay still,” she repeats, so he does.

He tries to suck in another breath, but this time his sandpaper lungs turn to flame, so he gasps and arches, both of which spark his body into lighting up in pain. He tries to scream, but the sound gets trapped by the lava in his throat, and the breath he managed to take runs out, and the dark spots that had been dancing around the edges of his eyes grow in a blink, and now he can’t help but pass out in Natasha’s arms.

<><><><><><><> 

There were children in the labs, children unwillingly donating blood and organs to a project that must have been designed by the devil himself, and Clint shot an arrow through the minion masquerading as a scientist’s eye and sent him back to the depths of fiery hell. What they hadn’t counted on, was hell exploding right there in the lab when the dead-man-switch no one had seen coming went off as it slipped through the dead scientist’s limp fingers.

The room exploded into an inferno, and the children – Clint had counted four – began to scream. He’d managed to escape the bomb with ringing ears and a searing burn across his waist, so he stumbled toward the kids because they were unwilling participants in the dead man’s plans and should be in school, not fighting for their lives. Clint ignored the pain and smoke that seemed to be searching for his lungs and pulled all four kids out of their bonds, grateful they’d been sheltered from the worst of the explosion by a steel partition.

Clint blinked blood out of his eyes as he undid the kids from the tables. It felt like a lucky break that one could walk, and he sent him running down the hallway and told him to call for Natasha, that she was safe to run to. The other three, though, were in rough shape already, and smoke was pouring into everyone’s lungs the longer they stayed there. Clint couldn’t carry three. He clenched his eyes shut and swallowed a wave of panic. How could he choose? Who would he take? Fuck it, he thought. Grab two and get them to safety, come back for the last. It was his only choice.

He pulled the two smallest into his arms with a grimace as they accidentally kicked his waist, where fire had burned his pants into his skin. He moved, though, because he had to move, and he stumbled out of the rubble and down a hallway, and pounded through a door out into the sunlight and course wind of the Rocky Mountains. He set the children down next to Natasha, who was trying to keep the other kid from rushing back inside.

“Take care of these two,” Clint panted, sucking in gulps of pure air like it was water. “There’s one more.”

He didn’t leave Nat any time to argue, and tore back into the building. He had to get to the last kid. He wouldn’t abandon him. The floor seemed to be hot as he ran back down the metal hallway, his boots clanging. The sound got drowned out the closer he got to the roar of the lab. It was as if the lab itself had come to life as a monster, trying to claim the innocent life of one more child.

Not on Clint’s watch.

He held his breath as he came back to the child, now unconscious on the table. The kid was probably ten years old, a pale boy with tousled red hair. Clint blinked and thought for a moment it was Barney that he was trying to save. He shook that thought away, back to the field of impossibility where it belonged. He moved to unlock the kid from his straps, but he accidentally brushed his waist on the table. His knees buckled from the searing pain, and he sucked in a smoke-filled breath as he grasped the hot table to stay upright. He doubled over, coughing and another explosion rocked the room, sending him to the ground.

A metal bar from the buckling ceiling crashed to the floor and clipped Clint in the forehead as he tried to get his bearings, and it left him spinning and bleeding and nauseous. He struggled to his feet and tried to ignore the acrid smell of burning flesh and metal, and he yanked the boy’s straps off in a fit of rage.

“I’m not leaving you,” he coughed out, and slung the limp body across his shoulder. When he turned to go back down the hallway, he had to close his eyes for a moment to will away the wave of fear that washed through his chest. The hallway was on fire. He could make out a shape at the end, and knew it was Nat, trying to decide whether to come for him.

He wouldn’t let her.

He moved through the pain, without any real air to breathe, he moved. He ran through the lab, had to swing the boy on his shoulder to the floor as a flaming panel crashed onto his back, but he moved again. He pulled the boy close to his chest as his waist burned, his face bled, and he ran.

Hopefully Phil would be waiting, too.

<><><><><><><><><><><> 

Phil runs. He tears through the parking lot like the devil is on his heels; he runs through the front doors of SHIELD and ignores the security check-in (thankfully Nick had called ahead and told them to let him pass), and he runs to the medical wing. He would have run straight to Clint if Natasha hadn’t grabbed him around the waist and pulled him to a halt before he hit the double doors back to the patient rooms.

“Phil, stop!” She commands, and he looks through the doors and down the hall as if he could catch a glimpse of Clint if he timed it right. He can’t. He looks at Natasha, sees her blood-streaked clothes and the hint of fear hiding in the green of her eyes.

Phil had sent them in. He’d decided, goddammit, to send one to the control room to gather the data and destroy the computers, and one to the lab to get the kids. None of their endless surveillance hinted at a dead-man’s switch, and it should have. Phil should have caught it in a manifest or supply request or something, but he didn’t.

“How is he?” he asks, and his voice sounds like he was the one who had smoke inhalation. He can’t help but close his eyes as she answers.

“I don’t know.” She swallows thickly and adds, “They lost him on the flight over, but revived him pretty quickly. Smoke inhalation.”

The words ‘they lost him’ come out like a report, like a field report, and it runs cold through Phil’s veins. He blinks and nods before moving to the window of the doors leading back to Clint.

“We were fighting,” he says, staring through the window, and his voice was is as flat as hers. “This whole week.” He recalls Clint storming past his office, deliberately not coming in. Both of them came to meetings at the minute the meeting started so they wouldn’t have to talk to each other. They always fought through silence and avoidance.

“I know,” she answers, and this time her voice had a lift to it, a sad lilt.

He looks at her sharply and then at the floor. “He’s reckless.”

She chuckles, and he looks back up at her. She nods. “I know.”

Her words are like a pin getting stuck in a balloon, and he blows out a long breath and shakes his head. “It’s so stupid to fight. He’ll always be reckless.”

She shrugs and moves to his side, draws him to her with her hand around his shoulders. “You’ll always think so.” She steers him to one of the hard, pastel-orange couches and they sit.

Phil puts his head on her shoulder and she runs her fingers through his hair, so soothing. He always relaxes when she touches him gently. It’s rare in their friendship, but she always knows when it would help. “The kids? Are they okay?” he asks.

“They’re being evaluated, but I don’t think they’re in any critical danger anymore.”                    

He closes his eyes. “He always saves the kids.”

“True,” she answers.

Phil sits up and looks into her deep green eyes. “Tell me what happened. I lost both comms after the explosion.”

She tells him and they wait.

 It isn’t as bad as either of them feared, but it’s bad.

Phil lets them lead him back to Clint’s room as the words ‘possible permanent lung damage,’ and ‘ventilator,’ and ‘unknown toxins in the bloodstream,’ are thrown at him – the fucking lab and all of the strange work the scientist was doing had exploded into a cocktail of unknown poisons that Clint inhaled.

They’d been giving each other the silent treatment for a week, and now Clint could be silenced forever. Phil clenches his fist as he enters Clint’s room.

The pallor of Clint’s cheeks and the way his eyes seem sunken into his skin is nothing next to the ventilator tube tucked into the corner of his mouth, the tape around his lips, the too rhythmic up and down of his chest. Phil stares at Clint’s mouth and licks his own lips in sympathy.

“The ventilator will let him do less work,” the doctor explains as Phil crosses his arms and tries to look at the doctor. He can’t pull his eyes off of Clint, though, and has to settle for being a little rude and just listening. “We plan on leaving it in for two days, keeping him sedated. We took a biopsy of lung tissue and when those results come back we’ll have a better idea of what we’re facing. His throat is also in bad shape from the toxins he was breathing in.”

Phil nods, takes his place in the chair next to the bed, and settles in to wait. Natasha joins him and presses a coffee into his hands, and they let the punctuating sound of the ventilator control the room.

Phil sleeps in the chair, occasionally stands to lean over Clint and run his hand through Clint’s hair and down his cold cheek, and works on a report until Natasha does two things the next morning. First, she directs him to room 243, where Phil finds a young boy with fiery red hair and pale, freckled skin. He has a cannula to help him breathe, and his left arm is bandaged severely. His mother, a rounder, thirty-something version of her son, sits next to him holding his hand.

Second, she kicks him out to go shower and sleep.

He showers, grabs his favorite pillow and a book, and heads back to Clint’s room. Natasha glares at him but just crosses her arms and sighs dramatically when he settles himself back into the chair with the pillow at his back.

<><><><><><><><> 

It’s his birthday. That’s a stupid thought, of course, because he doesn’t really know what day it is, or how long he’s been lying in this hospital bed, or whether it’s even June anymore, but the day of the last thing he remembers was a day before his birthday, and with the way his body is feeling now, it had to have been at least a day ago.

He swallows and tries to open his eyes.

Opening his eyes gets derailed by the sharp, vicious burning pain when he swallows, and he can’t help arching a little and clenching his fists in his sheets. A dull pain throbs around his waist, and his head hurts with the kind of headache that would be a day-ruiner if it were the only problem he was dealing with.

“Lay still,” Phil says, and Clint can hear the ragged quality of no sleep for a few days.

Clint obeys, and once he gets his breathing under control he tries to open his eyes again. Phil is leaning over his bed and runs a hand over Clint’s messy hair. Worry fills his eyes, and Clint can see dark circles, sallow skin, and hair that hasn’t been washed in a while. He keeps his mouth open so that he won’t accidentally swallow again, and blinks at Phil. He wants to ask what happened, but he’s afraid to talk and make his throat actually explode or something.

“You were in a chemical fire and nearly died of smoke inhalation. You’ve got a second degree burn on your waist just above your right hip, a mild concussion, and you were poisoned by the same smoke that almost choked you to death. The doctors don’t want you to talk for a bit, and they want me to give you as much pain killer as you need for the burn and for your throat and lungs. Apparently sucking in smoke filled with chemicals is hell on your throat,” he finishes with a shrug.

Phil picks up Clint’s hand and rests it in his own, an old routine for them when they’re too tired to sign.

Clint considers what Phil said for a moment, and then gets hit with a memory from the fire. He taps out in Morse code, ‘What about the kids?’

Phil smiles that tired smile that reminds Clint of sitting across from him at a rickety kitchen table and drinking stale coffee post-mission in cold safe houses in the middle of nowhere. That smile always made the mission worth it for Clint. “They’re safe. The last one you got out is suffering some complications from the toxins he breathed in, but they’re not life-threatening. The kids are safe.”

Clint closes his eyes and nods, and then taps out, ‘How long have I been out?’ but he can’t stay awake long enough to feel the answer Phil taps out on his skin.

When he wakes again, Phil is asleep in the chair next to the bed, and Natasha is the one leaning over his bed and smoothing down his hair. She doesn’t say anything when she meets his eyes, just smiles and picks up his hand. She taps out, ‘Phil’s sleeping for the first time in two days. I don’t want to wake him.’

Clint takes a tentative breath in and is met with the same pain as before, like someone is tapping needles into every inch of the inside of his throat, so he grits through the pain, nods and taps out, ‘Thanks.’

Nat just keeps stroking his hair, and Clint takes a moment to watch Phil sleep. ‘How is he?’ he taps out, finally.

She glances over at Phil and then offers Clint a small smile. ‘Worried. Won’t go back to his room. Has already set up a scholarship fund for each of those kids you saved.’

Clint must be exhausted, because he blinks away tears at that statement, but he’s not sure who they’re for. ‘What the hell was going on in that lab?’ he asks.

She shakes her head and frowns. ‘It doesn’t affect us,’ she taps, ‘And it’s over now.’

Clint frowns. ‘It affects me. I can’t fucking talk,’ he taps.

‘They think you’ll be okay in a week or so,’ she taps. ‘The toxin measurement is almost normal in your bloodstream now, and they figure your vocal chords will heal pretty quickly. The kids are doing okay.’

After a few days Clint is doing okay, too, but he still can’t really talk. Every time he tries, his throat lights up like firecrackers got shoved down it, so they go back to sign language when Clint gets more of his strength back. Phil concedes to go home and sleep when it’s clear that Clint’s out of the woods and is sleeping most of the time anyway, and Clint sleeps most of four days away and then decides he’s had enough.

Medical agrees, surprisingly, and Clint heads home to his apartment with Phil, where they had been stomping around each other for the week before the op. There’s a box wrapped in shiny purple paper with a deep purple ribbon sitting on their oak dining table, and Clint glances at Phil, who shrugs and signs, ‘Not me.’

He shuffles over to the table and sits down heavily. His body still feels like it was hit with a truck, and Phil slides a glass of water down in front of him. He can’t eat much, but they want him staying hydrated. He sips it, still cringing with every swallow, and pulls a card off of the package. It’s silver, and reads simply, “Happy Birthday. Natasha.”

With a grin he pulls the paper off of the box and opens the lid. It’s a square box, and kind of deep. Inside is a menagerie of gifts. He puts the purple kazoo to his lips but the look on Phil’s face shuts him down, so he sets it on the table. He pulls out a bag of marshmallows, a chocolate bar, and a box of graham crackers and he grins as Phil frowns.

“Too soon,” Phil signs, his face flat.

There’s a new Linden mystery novel, a purple light-up yo-yo, a bottle of peppermint schnapps with a note that reads, “Put it in your bedtime smoothie,” and four thank-you cards from the kids Clint pulled out of the lab. Each one makes him tear up a little more.

He rereads them and looks up to see Phil standing over him, and is pulled to his feet.

“Come on. Pajamas, pain meds, and then I have something for you, too.”

Clint follows, and lets Phil help him with his clothes and meds, and then Phil steers Clint to sit on the edge of the bed, and sits down next to him. He turns them both so that Clint can see Phil’s hands and face, and he begins to sign.

“We were fighting, and then you nearly died, and we missed your birthday,” he signs.

Clint swallows gingerly. Nods.

“We were fighting because I think you have a serious disregard for your own safety, and then you rushed in and saved the lives of four kids who had the unfortunate luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You saved them, and you also kept Natasha from going in after them, too. Reckless.”

Clint bites his lip and shakes his head. “No,” he signs. “Keeping people safe.”

Phil smiles softly, runs a hand down Clint’s cheek, and nods. “I know. You’re right. So I got you something.” He reaches into his pocket and grins sheepishly. “I’ll probably never live this down, but I also expect you to only show it to me when you need to.”

Clint can’t help smiling back as he takes the small business card from Phil’s hand. It’s blue, with silver print that reads, “Clint was saving someone who needed saving, and he was as careful as he could be. Lighten up and walk away for ten minutes. ‘Reckless’ isn’t the same as ‘heroic.’” At the bottom, Phil had signed it in black ink, with his full official signature, Phillip J. Coulson.

Clint laughs. He looks at Phil, who is grinning madly.

 Phil signs, “Happy Birthday.” After he brushes a kiss along Clint’s lips, he adds, “There’s a pound of that Belgian chocolate that you love in the refrigerator, too.”

Clint pulls his wallet from the nightstand and puts the card away with a grin.

He has to use it two months later, and it saves them several days of not talking to each other.

 


End file.
